The Sweet Hereafter

THE SWEET HEREAFTER                A                    

Canada  (110 mi)  1997  ‘Scope  d:  Atom Egoyan 

When, lo, as they reached the mountain-side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountainside shut fast…

—Verse 13, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, by Robert Browning (1888), Robert Browning: the Pied Piper of Hamelin: the complete text

Egoyan’s ferociously sorrowful adaptation from the Russell Bank’s novel, a stunningly beautiful, mesmerizing film that leaves one in a trance, always understating the power of the subjects, using skillful interwoven time periods, parceling out little bits and pieces of information, much of it told in flashback, moving fluidly back and forth across month’s of screen time, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Paul Sarossy, with a medieval and renaissance musical score by Mychael Danna, all in a rhythmic, musical dialogue of pure cinematic poetry.  One of the most powerful, yet at the same time, so quietly affecting and profoundly moving films, with so much empty space to fill, both in the visual outer and emotional inner worlds, and with such haunting music which becomes the lead character in the film, leading us like moths to a flame through this amazing emotional landscape.  Egoyan had just became a father when this film was made, changing the setting of the book from upstate New York to British Columbia, also reducing a multiple first person narrative of five characters in the book to two main characters, while adding references to The Pied Piper of Hamelin that are not in the book, which so impressed author Russell Banks that he has a small role in the film as the town doctor, freely admitting that he felt Egoyan’s adaptation of Browning’s poem is an improvement over the demolition derby imagery used in the book, which was based upon a real event, a 1989 Bus crash in Alton, Texas where twenty-one children drowned, forty-nine others were injured and it led to a massive $150 million dollar litigation, out of which the participating lawyers earned roughly $50 million dollars in fees.  The film won the 2nd place Jury Prize at Cannes, also the FIPRESCI prize, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, where a once every decade, 2004 Toronto Film Festival polling of festival programmers, film critics, industry professionals and Canadian film scholars ranked the film fourth in the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time. 

 

The film is set in a small Canadian mountain town in the winter calm which followed the deaths of fourteen children who died in a school bus crash.  Ian Holm plays Mitchell Stevens, the city lawyer who tries to represent the grieving parents, all living in separate, isolated homes with long, winding driveways in a class-action lawsuit against the bus company with the ultimate promise of money, to give direction to their anger and “the sheer magnitude of your suffering,” yet leaving them in a more divided state of anger and disarray.  At the same time he seeks to find expression for his own loss and anger, “you suffer enough rage and helplessness and your love turns to something else, it turns to steaming piss,” while losing his daughter Zoe (Caerthan Banks, Russell Banks’ daughter) to a world of drug addiction, clinics, flop-houses, more drugs, more money for drugs, all premised on her lie that she was going to try for something better.  But she only grows more faraway and distant, lost to the streets, where eventually she contracts HIV and he is consumed with losing her, which is contrasted against the innocence of Zoe as a beautiful child, with an extraordinary memory of horror when she was bit by baby black widow spiders and he had to be prepared “to go all the way,” to surgically cut her throat, per a doctor’s phone instructions, to save her life, as otherwise the swelling would cause her to stop breathing before she could get to the hospital.  This is contrasted against yet another ominous story of the Pied Piper, a bedtime story lulling the children to a sweet rest, after ridding a town of rats, the Pied Piper took the children away because he was mad they refused to honor their debt to him, so he wanted the town punished.  Promising a place “where everything was strange and new,” the Pied Piper lured the children out of the town, all skipping and dancing after his wonderful music to an open portal in the mountainside before it closed up.  Yet one was left behind, “one was lame and could not dance the whole of the way.”  The prominent use of a fairy tale motif effectively alters the point of view to that of the children, giving meaning to the bus crash from a child’s perspective—the unheard voices.   

As the lawyer, tormented by the fate of his own daughter, Stevens meets the families, which the audience meets as well, becoming familiar, trying to convince them “There is no such thing as an accident…It’s up to me to ensure moral responsibility in society,” while the camera always sees on the walls pictures of lost children, photographs, memories, coinciding with the opening shot of a mother, her bare breast exposed, lying asleep in bed with her husband and small child, an image of family beauty, safe and secure.  Another husband and wife see their adopted son off on the school bus, seemingly small against the white sky and the snowy mountains, an act of simplicity, a parental good-bye, an instinctual concern, an unknowing, final farewell before the bus is lost in a beautiful mountainside covered in snow.  Sarah Polley (18 at the time) plays Nicole, the lone survivor of the crash, a 15-year old left paralyzed from the waist down, clearly identifying with the cripple who was left behind, feeling guilty that she survived when others perished, seen reading the poem as she babysits for the two children of Billy Ansel (Bruce Greenwood), children who later die in the accident, so eloquently interspersed throughout, providing a magnificent performance, singing Tragically Hip’s theme song “Courage,” Sarah Polley - Courage (The Sweet Hereafter) - YouTube (4:20).  She is, herself, a victim of her own father’s incest, and burns with rage at him now that she is crippled and in a wheelchair, no longer able to realize her dream.  “I’m a wheelchair girl now and it’s hard to pretend I’m a beautiful rock star.  Remember, Daddy, that beautiful stage that you were going to build for me?  You were going to light it with candles.”  As the accident is shown, the children’s screams are consumed in a hushed silence, to a deeper agony within our memory, to a place where only silence answers, to a sweet peace, where train whistles can be heard in the background offering silent passage to “the sweet hereafter,” a place where people can find peace with their fate.    

It’s dull in our town since my playmates left!
I can't forget that I’m bereft
Of all the pleasant sights they see,
Which the Piper also promised me.
For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,
Joining the town and just at hand,
Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,
And flowers put forth a fairer hue,
And everything was strange and new.

But this peace is disrupted and disturbed by the town’s reaction to the lawyer, by an innocent girl’s misplaced blame, by a silent rage and a promise that money can somehow make things right, where the lives of the townspeople begin to disintegrate, severing the ties and values that created this community.  Billy pleads with Nicole’s parents to drop the lawsuit, “I’ll even give you the money I got for my kids.  That’s the way we used to do it, remember?  Help each other, because this was a community.”  Developing themes of guilt, separation, anger, unnamable sin, and excruciating loss, the human response to such a nightmarish tragedy is to seek relief, compensation, and perhaps even closure for their loss.  But that remains elusive and unattainable, as each individual weaves their own way through the various stages of loss, where Dolores (Gabrielle Rose) the bus driver and the parents of the lost children all end up someplace different, if only mentally, because life as they knew it had changed forever.  At the sight of the relocated bus driver, we hear the words of Nicole in a voiceover, “As you see her, two years later, I wonder if you realize something, I wonder if you understand that all of us, Doloros, me, the children who survived, the children who didn’t, that we’re all citizens of a different town now.  A place with its own special rules, special laws, a town of people living in the sweet hereafter.”  Holm and Polley give career best performances on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, where he is an estranged parent and a hollow soul, where anger and frustration cuts through his icy exterior, while she is a lost child and violated innocent, yet remains the fiercely intelligent moral center throughout.  In the world of quiet yet lacerating chamber dramas, this is a towering work, perhaps the film that all other works of heart-wrenching trauma and despair must compare themselves to, shot in the silence and vast wintry landscape of endless snow, an extraordinary film about grief, about broken promises, and the lonely, personal search within ourselves to find redemption. 

Dance with a Stranger

Ruth Ellis, barmaid, the last woman hanged in England, 1955

David Blakely, race car driver

 DANCE WITH A STRANGER              A-                

Great Britain  (102 mi)  1985  d:  Mike Newell

If you marry her, she’ll drive you down to her level as she’s incapable of rising to yours.  —Carole Findlater (Jane Bertish)

I keep hoping that you’ll change, but you never do.  —Ruth Ellis (Miranda Richardson)   

A blisteringly intense examination of class differences, where on July 13, 1955, Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be executed in England, hanged for what can only be considered a crime of passion, as she readily admitted her guilt, so this was never a case of guilt or innocence, where her public crucifixion in the press was largely due to the prevailing attitudes of the times which condemned and disapproved of her lower class circumstances.  Apparently, they couldn’t hang her fast enough, as the trial started June 20, 1955, and she was hanged July 13^th, a mere three weeks later.  Her real crime, according to the press and much of British society, was attempting to enter a higher class level of society for which she was considered unsuitable and deemed unfit.  Her controversial execution led to a tidal wave of public outrage which eventually led to the abolition of capital punishment.  Director Mike Newell was noted as a television director, where this stylishly powerful earlier period piece remains his best effort.  It marked the debut of British actress Miranda Richardson in the role of Ruth, a powerful presence as a Jean Harlow-style platinum blond who simply walks away with the picture, scintillating throughout, perhaps reminiscent of Fassbinder’s spellbinding portrayal of women in THE STATIONMASTER’S WIFE (BOLWEISER) (1977), THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979), or LOLA (1981), each using a different lead actress, or the earlier Bette Davis rendition of the film OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934), a scathingly bleak and unpleasant slide into the lower depths of society.  The tough script by Shelagh Delaney, who won an Academy Award for A TASTE OF HONEY (1961), is a surprisingly gritty and complex psychological examination of her circumstances, feeling authentic throughout, without a false note, where Richardson’s uncompromising portrayal is a revelation, seemingly driven by primal forces, where her shrill tone of near manic hysteria is balanced by her beauty and sirenesque sensuality, definitely a man pleaser, where once she’s got her hands on you, she doesn’t easily let go.  The film explores the corrosive power of sexual attraction as possession, where you’d have to go to Ôshima’s IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976) to find a couple that goes to greater extremes.  Ruth Ellis is a Soho nightclub barmaid in London, where she’s part manager and lives with her 11-year old son Andy (Matthew Carroll) upstairs on relatively meager earnings.  She’s used to making the rounds, dancing with customers, and encouraging men to order plenty of overpriced drinks, where her familiarity with the opposite sex belies her cynical sense of cunning and manipulation, where men are objects to be used, not enjoyed.  

The club is frequented by London’s financially elite when they’re out slumming in Soho, looking for available girls, which is how Ruth meets David Blakely (Rupert Everett), a superficially shallow yet ridiculously handsome man who also happens to be an upper class playboy, a moody, self-absorbed alcoholic who envisions himself racing at LeMans, brought there by another race car aficionado, Desmond (Ian Holm).  While David’s drinking doesn’t exactly enhance his racing skills, his roving eye for the ladies is perhaps his real skill, as he already has a girlfriend (later his fiancé) that is more along the lines of the kind of girl you bring home to mother.  However, within moments of seeing each other, David instantly hits on Ruth, who is willing to overlook all the immediately recognizable, disreputable attributes, as despite his class arrogance and obvious drunkenness, the guy is easy on the eyes, thinking perhaps he can be her wild card out of poverty and lead her to a better life.  The two begin a scandalously torrid affair, where all his friends constantly remind him of his sense of privilege, where this girl simply doesn’t fit, making her the butt of all their jokes, which is why Ruth despises them all, and hates David when he doesn’t stick up for her.  But that’s not going to happen, as David is simply incapable of thinking about anyone other than himself, arriving at her door at all hours of the day or night expecting immediate attention, completely disregarding her son, or anything else for that matter.  Fast cars, booze, and women is all he cares about, but he’s hooked on Ruth, as she routinely drops everything to be with him, where their love/hate relationship, often exaggerated in movies, couldn’t be more believable, often parading other women in front of  her, constantly whining about the wretched state of their miserable lives, but going to bed together apparently solves everything.  During several of the arguments, where physical abuse gets involved, Desmond steps in, as he’s madly in love with her as well, but uses his deep pockets as a potent weapon, offering her whatever she needs, which is really manipulative code for that’s what he’d like her to provide him.  Nonetheless, as Ruth consistently leaves Andy alone, a heartbreakingly sad aspect of the picture, Desmond becomes a surrogate father figure, as there’s literally no one else filling the void.  

Richardson is simply astonishing in a gut-wrenching performance, while Everett plays an equally damaged soul. The movie becomes an ongoing display of character flaws, as both Ruth and David are viciously selfish individuals, where there’s little sympathy for either one, where David is used to just taking and getting whatever he wants, irrespective of the consequences, while Desmond is more of a socially repressed weakling, who never acts on impulse, but is all about manner and routine, believing what Ruth needs is some stability and consistency in her life, trying to provide a safe haven for Ruth and Andy, hoping to possess her, but Ruth quickly betrays him, perhaps best expressed in an exquisitely beautiful shot in the London fog, where horses are being led down the street by lamps lit by fire, where the scene is reminiscent of Jack the Ripper, as the two inseparable lovers retreat to a dark alleyway and have sex like dogs on the street, not even bothering with any hint of respectability.  These acts of desperation only grow worse, where out of considerable social pressure David spends time with a fiancé from his own social class and stops seeing Ruth, which literally drives her mad with jealousy.  She makes inappropriate appearances in his social circles with disastrous results, where in their eyes she is making a fool of herself, but in her eyes she is fighting to hold onto what’s hers.  Beautifully shot by Peter Hannan, where his overly saturated colors of the nearby countryside are a sumptuous relief from the claustrophobic and shadowy world in London, a near colorless existence filled with an air of melancholic bleakness, where Ruth can be seen singing the title song at the club without a hint of expression on her face, where she’s a lifeless imitation of the lively and confident woman that opened the film Dance with a Stranger - Miranda Richardson - YouTube (1:27).  Oblique angles often frame the shot, while mirrors are prominently featured, perhaps reflecting the interchanging role between them in the escalating psychological obsession, a pitiful degradation of the human spirit, where the performances of both appear tortuously tragic, often expressed by the harrowing saxophone lead from the moody period score of Richard Hartley, where Ruth is so damaged that the only kind of man she can respect is the kind that continually abuses her.  In a world of dangerous impulses, it’s the psychological imbalances that are continually left unattended, resulting in one of the most hauntingly cruel depictions of human tragedy. 

Alien

ALIEN             A                    

USA  Great Britain  (116 mi)  1979  ‘Scope  d:  Ridley Scott      

In space, no one can hear you scream

Ridley Scott’s warm-up for his real masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982), that would come several years later, including similar uses of robots or replicants as well as the infamous rain sequences.  Each deal with the idea of technology run wild, while ALIEN has an extremely subversive view of corporate corruption and deceit, particularly the idea of lying to employees in order to protect top secret military aims, where the lives of employees in outer space are literally owned by the corporation, requiring each to sign a contract to that effect, alleviating the company of all liability in the event something disastrous occurs.  Therein lies the cold-hearted, underlying premise to this story, where reality isn’t what you think it is, as it’s disguised under the lies of an alternative space mission, where only the top officers are aware of the circumstances, so some of the shudders in this film is the degree to which corporate greed is emphasized—very much ahead of its time in that respect.  With several nods to Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), certainly at the center of this premise is a ship computer, known as mother, that no one has access to except the top officers.  The rest are excluded from the chain of command and thereby shielded from the truth of their real mission.  This story concerns an outer space cargo ship that is returning home from a mining expedition, where its passengers are in a scientifically imposed deep sleep, but woken up 10 months before their anticipated arrival time to answer a distress signal on an isolated asteroid where they encounter an alien life form that horrifically makes its way inside their space vessel, eventually picking off the crew one by one.  The pervasive sense of dread turns this into a haunted house story with a monster on the loose, as in no time this crew is lost in the woods with no way out.  

Adapted from a Dan O’Bannon story, who previously wrote the story and screenplay for John Carpenter’s DARK STAR (1974), assisted by Ronald Shusett, with amazing visual effects from H.R. Giger (surrealist alien creator), Carlo Rambaldi (alien head design), Brian Johnson and Nick Allder (special effects), and Denys Ayling (miniature photography), with an extremely elaborate and intricately created set design by Michael Seymour (production design), Leslie Dilley and Roger Christian (art), and Ian Whittaker (set).  From the outset, the camera is the only stirring creature as it slowly moves around corners and gazes at the dark cavernous design of the space ship interior, taking on the attributes of inquisitiveness and curiosity.  When the humans awake to discover their situation, all done by computer (perhaps the most archaic presence in the entire film), there’s an interesting use of improvisation in their conversation, using the Altman style of overlapping dialogue which creates a sense of authenticity in the moment, where soon each of the characters begins to take shape in the eyes of the audience.  The corporate hierarchy (and great cast) is immediately established, where the chief mechanics, the two guys that fix things and make the ship go are on the lowest pay grade (Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton as Parker and Brett), while Sigourney Weaver and Veronica Cartwright are Ripley and Lambert, the middle management officers under John Hurt (Kane), commanded by chief science officer Ian Holm (Ash), and ship commander Tom Skerritt (Dallas).  For openers, the engineers complain they’re not getting equal shares of the bonus pay for the work they’re doing, while in no time, Ash reminds them of a hidden clause in their contract that if they fail to carry out their mission, as assigned, they will forfeit all wages.  So immediately they are put in their place by the ship foremen, where life in outer space resembles the same working conditions on earth of an overworked and underpaid work force.  But that similarity ends as soon as they explore the asteroid, where with shuddering efficiency, there is a stunning violation of standard protocol as they allow the alien to enter their ship. 

What immediately becomes noticeable is the lazy nonchalance in the way this is handled, and the lack of precaution used.  Anyone with a pet dog or cat, or even a bird, knows the care one uses to keep them from escaping out of the house—by closing the windows and doors behind you.  This crew routinely leaves doors open allowing the alien free access to their entire ship.  And despite the obvious danger to all, when they have it in their possession, no one is assigned to watch it.  So they display a rather casual display of ignorance in their approach to this alien intrusion, all of which takes on even greater significance when the alien grows to monstrous size and slowly starts attacking the crew.  The monster itself, whose appearance is delayed and only gradually seen until the end, is a marvel of grotesque proportion, yet what we remember is the gooey slime it leaves behind and the continually drooling giant teeth, where it stealthily moves mysteriously overhead through the ventilation ducts.  Despite the passage of thirty years, the film still holds up because Scott does an exquisite job conveying a creepy sense of panic and fear and things that go bump in the night, even while most of the horrific violence takes place offscreen, where the body count, quicker edits and dark claustrophobic interior adds to an increasingly developing paranoia on the ship.  The pulsating strobe lights and emergency siren sound loop become almost unbearable as the film races to its spectacular heavy breathing finale, which is an interesting mixture of frantic desperation, matching Weaver’s sensuous vulnerability and cool head against a ghastly beast that obviously uses and consumes humans at will.  In the director’s cut, the added scenes are a nasty confrontation between Lambert and Ripley outside the infirmary, a brief shot of the alien hanging like one of the chains hanging from the ceiling above Brett in the interior rain (from condensation) as he’s looking for the cat, Parker gets Brett’s blood splattered on him as Brett is carried off, and the infamous ‘cocooning’ sequence where humans become stored fuel for the monster.  Along with his next film Blade Runner, Scott has created two of the best sci-fi films ever made and could never have made that film without the meticulous precision shown here working with such extraordinary special effects, creating one of the great monster movies ever, certainly better than all the follow ups which resemble the CGI assault to the senses shown today, a blitzkrieg of explosions and mayhem which the audience substitutes for excitement.  The thrill of ALIEN is largely due to the deliberate pacing and stunning futuristic visual innovation of the time which precedes the CGI revolution in cinema, where the director himself had to know how, from the wordless opening restraint, he could use the audience’s natural fear of the unknown along with a pervading sense of gloom to help build the mounting tension to a peak of madness and hysteria, all the while embracing the fundamental essence of what it is to be human.